2023-07-28 16:27:01
A carpet of broken glass shimmers in the light. In the middle, a chair sways unbalanced, while, among the debris, lie small sharp metal objects and cartridges of nitrous oxide, this laughing gas that adolescents inhale, at the risk of keeping neurological sequelae. Title honey on a knifethis work by Laura Lamiel offers a perfect introduction to the art of the oxymoron that she deployed for the whole summer in the basement of the Palais de Tokyo, in Paris.
It was time to exhibit this octogenarian – defended by the Marcelle Alix gallery – in a major Parisian institution, after several tributes in regional museums, first in Grenoble in 2000, then in Saint-Étienne (2013) and at the Crac of Sete (2019). Oscillating between minimal art and the intimate mythologies dear to Louise Bourgeois, her sculptural installations play wonderfully with the alliance of opposites.
Of the cells under surveillance
In the folds, a piece created especially for this Parisian exhibition, Laura Lamiel has thus compressed, in a metal bookcase, hundreds of white shirts and linens, on which a typewritten sentence recurs like a mantra: “Nothing is to be done, everything is to be undone. » An allusion to the condition of women monopolized by the daily care of others. By marrying cotton and steel, immaculate white and stormy gray, the protective softness of clothing and the rigidity of social norms, the artist evokes the coercion imposed on an absent body, just suggested by the presence of a chair and two shoe trees, two lead feet, riveted to the ground.
THE Cells, small glass chambers which are extended by a table outside, present another surveillance and constraint device. Some are equipped with one-way glasses used by the police to see without being seen. One of them is even called The Song of Love, in reference to Jean Genet’s film, featuring prisoners spied on in their privacy by a guard. There too, Laura Lamiel handles hot and cold, placing in one of her cells a white enamelled steel table surrounded by dazzling neon lights, while, on the other side of the window, a wooden table responds to her. , she, laden with books, singular objects. As if two worlds clashed there, one industrial and standardized, the other personal and secret, like our lives torn between public and private spaces.
Monochromatic compositions
Like breathing in the face of these oppressive works, a video shows, in a corner, a Multitude humans walking freely on the banks of the Ganges in Benares, in a vast open space, while voices resound, the joyful cries of children… On the ground, large monochrome compositions also contrast with the transparent verticality of the cells. Squares that make color sing, reminding us that Laura Lamiel was an abstract painter in her early days. Here is a carpet of orange-yellow incense grains, on which float scales and small copper weights. A dreamlike landscape, between the Zen garden strewn with sound bowls and the infinite swarming of stars where planets float, one of which is rotating.
Not far away, a mosaic of books, tinted with red ink and meticulously aligned, stacked, like bricks of flesh and blood, mixes the memory of the artist’s mother, a professor of literature, and titles borrowed from Raymond Roussel, this “passer of absurdity”. On the wall, paintings under glass respond to it, crimson tears, revealing the hardness of a metal plate below, while reflecting the passing visitor. Magnificent wounded, echoed by the coats sewn in cotton wool by the artist, in reaction to the attacks in Spain in 2004, and steel straw shirts. Of the samples which it seems to invite us to rid ourselves of.
In an evocation of her studio, at the end of the journey, Laura Lamiel hung the large drawing of a closed eyelid. Up close, the work reveals itself to be made up of hundreds of words drawn in pencil and repeated in prayer: “May all beings be delivered from suffering. » Like a meditation exercise in the face of the cries of the world that she captures with startling acuity.
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When graffiti meets contemporary art
Since 2012, around sixty street artists have created works in the basement of the Palais de Tokyoat the invitation of Hugo Vitrani as part of the Lasco Project.
Until September 10, the exhibition “La Bite des termites” continues this adventure by deliberately taking graffiti out of the ghetto in which it is too often locked up to observe how this art, underground, fugitive, inscribed in the urban margins, actually nourishes contemporary art.
Among the fifty or so artists gathered, historical figures of New York or European street art like Rammellzee, A-One, Zloty or SKKI© thus rub shoulders with painters like Dado, Télémaque or Matta, the performance artist Valie Export, visual artists working on language like Tania Mouraud or Jenny Holzer who collaborated with the graffiti artist Lady Pink.
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